Complicating Permanency Planning
POSITION PAPER
In July 2020, the Ontario government announced that they would be making extensive changes to child welfare in Ontario. One significant aspect of the changes is permanency planning, where the provincial government intends to achieve better outcomes with respect to permanency planning.
In the fall of 2021, the Ontario government began their public consultations with respect to permanency planning. After attending one of the public consultation settings, the Collective of Child Welfare Survivors (“CCWS”) believes it is incumbent upon us to intervene on the process and discourse emanating in and from these consultations.
This position paper is our attempt to complicate how we understand permanency planning, as well as an attempt to disrupt the cyclical nature in which Ontario’s child welfare survivors are asked the same question multiple times to no substantive and transformative change—even when the provincial government attests that they will actualize the results of public consultations. At the centre of our position paper are the interests of child welfare survivors often left at the periphery of these processes, particularly Black, Indigenous, and racialized child welfare survivors in the multiple ways we experience child welfare. It is our hope that through this position paper, we can approach child welfare survivors with a sense of radical ethics and care.